Black and grey dotwork tattoo of ginkgo, hop cones, lavender sprigs and leaves covering a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical leaves and hops on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm covered in botanical motifs, including a large ginkgo leaf, several hop cones, lavender-like sprigs and broad serrated leaves on a branch. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense stippled dots, giving the design a textured, engraved look. The image is black and grey and shows the arm against an outdoor background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Leaf Branch Lavender Sprig Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the ginkgo first, the one the council planted in the gap between blocks the year before the estate was painted. Nobody else on the ninth floor notices it turning gold in October, when the fan-shaped leaves drop all at once overnight and the car park goes yellow. You have a carrier bag and a pair of kitchen scissors, because Mrs Okonedo on eleven said cuttings from a female tree are the only ones worth keeping, and you are not sure which kind this is.

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The hops are the other problem. They came up through the cracked paving by the bins, three bines of them, and by June they had climbed the railings of the walkway to your door. Dev from the flats opposite says they are illegal to pick, which is nonsense, but he says it with such conviction that you keep the cones in a tin on the windowsill, dried and papery, smelling of bitter honey and wet cardboard.

On the last evening before the demolition notice goes up, you walk the length of the walkway with the tin under your arm and press a cone into the soil at the foot of the ginkgo. The bark is cold through your sleeve. Below, someone's radio is playing a football commentary, and a child is counting to ten, badly, over and over.

You do not know if hops will take in clay that has been rubble for forty years. You do not know if the tree will outlast the block. But in March, when you come back to check, there is a green shoot the length of a fingernail pushing up through the leaf litter, and you crouch on the wet concrete and stay there until the light goes.